Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday.

The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode.

Natural variations in the Arctic climate “may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979,” the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 — late summer in…

A shortage of gas-fired power generation and gas supply has seen the Australian gas market operator issue a blackout warning. The country faces a gas crunch from 2019, as a string of outages and electricity price spikes in Australia‘s eastern states over the past year highlighted the need for gas-fired generation to shore up power supplies.

“We’re going to see security of both systems, gas and electricity, become more challenging,” Mike Cleary, chief operating officer of the Australian

Reuters reports that according to the AEMO annual gas outlook, more gas power plants will be needed as they can raise and lower output more quickly than coal-fired plants as a back-up for intermittent wind and solar. The need has become more acute after three new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants opened in the northeast, tripling gas demand and drawing…

Ever the showman, Elon Musk has promised to fix South Australia’s power problems!

From Yahoo:

Elon Musk is not shy of a challenge. The billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla has promised that he can install enough battery capacity in South Australia’s power grid to fix the state’s energy capacity problems within 100 days, and if he fails, will do the whole thing for free.

Musk made the promise after Tesla’s vice president for energy products Lyndon Rive told the Australian Financial Review that a battery storage grid that can store between 100 and 300 megawatt hours of energy, enough to provide the extra capacity needed to prevent blackouts in the region, could be installed 100 days after a contract was signed.

The boast about extra capacity comes after increased battery production at Tesla’s gigafactory in Nevada, but Musk showed he wasn’t kidding by saying…